Death and…
By Andrey Butov
taxes, of course.
And not even the kind that force you to write a check while grinding your teeth and cursing every government agency under the sun.
I’m in the middle of setting up a proper merchant account for Antair.
It’s really about time. We’ve been using Plimus until now, an intermediary payment processing middle-man, as all good and proper software startups do nowadays. But revenues are up, and the 10% payment processing fee is really starting to hurt.
The most annoying part of setting up a proper merchant account isn’t the administrative nonsense you have to go through with the 10 bankers, the 20 accountants, and the 30 lawyers. It’s not even the week being spent writing server scripts and client-side forms to swallow up and process these orders. It’s the taxes…
Antair is based in New York City. As such, we are obligated to ‘collect’ (no matter how nice of a word you choose, you’re still charging customers for it) sales tax from New York State residents. But in New York, there is no flat tax rate that you can throw into a javascript function and be done with. Nope. Our tax rate is a combination of state and local sales tax — with the local rate depending on the county — of which there are over 80!
So, for those who have yet to go through this mess, get ready to write a payment processing backend script, 85% of which deals with nothing but applying the proper tax rate.
Inevitable…
